1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for editing electronic documents, and particularly relates to techniques for editing supplementary information attached to manuscript data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conversion of paper documents to electronic documents using a scanner, character recognition processing on these electronic documents in order to carry out various types of editing, such as machine translation or layout changes (formatting changes), using personal computers and the like is performed daily. However, documents often have a line drawn under a certain part, or a note written in blank spaces (see FIG. 1, for example). Such information, which is not part of the manuscript portion, is referred to below as “supplementary information”. If supplementary information is included in the electronic document, the manuscript portion (manuscript data) is extracted and translated so that a position of the manuscript portion is changed because of difference in language. Thus, correlation between the translated manuscript data and the supplementary information that is attached to the original data is also changed.
Therefore, it is necessary to appropriately change the position of the supplementary information in accordance with the changed position of the manuscript. In JP H7-282062A, a technique is disclosed for attaching an underline, in units of clauses, to the electronic document, and then attaching an underline to the equivalent phrase after translation. For documents to which supplementary information is attributed, JP H7-295970A discloses a technique for storing the position relationship of each document element of a manuscript before and after editing, and for attaching the supplementary information to the manuscript after editing, based on this position relationship. JP 2000-163414A discloses a technique for storing the position arrangement of supplementary information in association with the document elements in the vicinity of the position in which the supplementary information is arranged when attaching the supplementary information to the electronic document, and for changing the position arrangement of the supplementary information based on that correlation when there is a change in the content of the electronic document.
Nevertheless, the technology disclosed in JP H7-282062A is only capable of drawing underlines in units of clauses, and cannot handle a multitude of types of and methods for arranging the supplementary information, such as leader lines drawn between lines on the manuscript, or notes written in blank spaces of the manuscript. Furthermore, the technology disclosed in JP H7-295970A and JP 2000-163414A is able to change the position of supplementary information in accordance with movements after processing to document elements, but cannot change the size of the supplementary information (such as font size of notes and length of underlines). Even if, for example, the size of the characters before and after translation is maintained, generally, the length of corresponding words (phrases) differs between languages, and so if the size of the supplementary information (for example, the length of an underline) remains the same, then an offset will be created in the correlation between the document element and the supplementary information attributed to that document element.